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Cartoons and comics strips can often be seen in some surprising places, but probably none more so than this boating shelter in Battersea Park, London.

The comic artists Sean Azzopardi, Joe Decie, John Cei Douglas, Ellen Lindner, Douglas Noble and Paul O’Connell drew eight different short comic strips about a fictional 1974 rock concert in the park. These have been enlarged and pasted on to the shelter and can be read in any order.

Cartoons outside the printed page do have to compete with some “real world” factors though. And in this case it’s not graffiti, as you might expect, but a staggeringly large colony of spiders!

The boating shelter strips accompany the Hypercomics exhibition which is at the nearby Pump House Gallery.

The show features four rooms by four artists, Adam Dant, Warren Pleece, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, and Dave McKean, above.

It’s very much an experimental exhibition, with comic strip narratives spiralling off in all kinds of directions and intersecting with the building itself.

Like any experiment it’s not wholly successful, some of the strips are far to wordy to be exhibited on walls. But McKean’s room worked brilliantly and was the stand-out for me, telling a compelling story with beautifully drawn comic frames alongside sculptures, photography and masks.

Here at the Bloghorn we’re always ready to applaud when people do something different with cartoons and comics, and the exhibition Hypercomics, which is at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea, London, appears to do just that.
Subtitled The Shapes of Comics to Come, it runs until September 26 and features work on four floors by Adam Dant, Dave McKean and Warren Pleece, above, and Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, below.

The show, we are told, “will explode the narratives in their work from the printed page into the gallery space and beyond”. We’re also told that it “uses the building’s unusual architecture to weave a story whose outcome depends upon how visitors interact and move through the space”.

If any of that sounds confusing, it probably indicates that the show should be experienced, rather than written about. And as the curator of the show is the comics expert Paul Gravett, who usually has his finger on the pulse, it’s sure to be nothing less than intriguing.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a programme of screenings, talks, workshops and events. The newly refurbished Pump House Gallery is in the rather marvellous Battersea Park, so make a day of it and take a picnic! For more information, visit the Pump House Gallery website.

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